As you know, we are always looking for ways to improve and measure how your students learn.

With that in mind, we have created the following writing tasks:

Career plans

How we met

You can find these tasks by selecting the new ‘Assessment: Writing’ course in the course menu while searching for EF lessons.

In these writing tasks, the students will write a short personal essay in which they describe their plans for their future or how they met someone.

Ideally, you would give one of these tasks to your class in the first week or two after the break and the remaining one towards the end of the year. The first writing task will help you decide what aspects of writing your students need to practice. The second task will serve as a great tool for you and your students to track how much they have improved since the beginning of the year.

We have created a rubric for assessing the communicative and organisational aspects of the essay. We suggest that your students read the rubric before they write the essay, so they understand what is expected.EF Class Writing Sample Rubric.pdf

In order to save you time and give you additional information on your students’ progress, our academic team will analyse these essays and send you a report on your students’ communicative success in the task (based on the rubric), errors, sentence length, and vocabulary usage.

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback or comments by replying to this topic.

I really like the idea of this assignment. I tried it in one of my English 5-groups today and it went so and so. The main problem was that after break, most students have been logged out of the app. And then, when they try to log in, the app tells them it's the wrong information, even though it is not. Luckily, after a few tries, most students have been able to log in.

When it comes to the writing assessment, we did the one about careers. For most students, as soon as they clicked in the box and began to write, half the screen was covered in white. It made it very difficult for the students to see what they were writing. One student also accidentally pressed the tick-off box and submitted her text before she was done. So that was unfortunate. Other students did not finish the assignment in an hour, which I didn't think would be a problem. However, we did lose some time at the beginning.

The idea of the assignment is very good, but it didn't work as smoothly as I had hoped.

Hi,I used the writing assessment task (How we Met) with my SA15B English 5 group on Wednesday 13/1 at around 12.50-14:00. My students were all busy writing and had probably been working for 12-15 minutes, when they all yelled out. All of their writing had disappered!We were all still in EF and internet seemed to be working as I was also in vKlass at the same time and was not disconnected. We recitfied the situation, by starting the wrtiting again in a Word document, then copy and pasting it into the actual task in EF.They also said that they would of liked some kind of confirmation that the essay had been sent correctly. (Maybe a green tick?)No idea if this is a bug or our internet, but it was very strange!/Hildé

First and foremost, thank you for taking such great care of us this past week. I especially enjoyed second breakfast! I'm back at work and today I tried the writinig task with my other English 5 group. Like last time, it went so and so, but still a bit better. The white box appeared once more, but it seemes to be connected to those who are using keyboards instead of writing on the screen on their iPads.

Some students also had issues scrolling and a few were unable to log in.

Since Internet was spotty and the app a bit unreliable, some students wrote in pages. But when they tried to copy-paste it into the app, they couldn't.

All in all, it worked better this time, but we still experienced a few hiccups, where some had to do with the Internet and others with the app.

I used this feature two weeks ago in two of my classes. One class had to head for their next lesson and I left the lesson "still open" for them to submit later on. Unfortunately the students have not submitted anything. However, in the second group some students submitted answers and I am really keen on getting to see what your academic team repsonds.

To comment on the tool it definitely needs to have some sort of "save"-button in order for students to not mess up and loose all their work. Some of my students started out writing in EFClass but then had to go to a word/page-document and then paste it in EFClass. It's a great idea but at the moment it is still a bit too "shaky" for other teachers to dare try it out. I like to try things out the trial-and-error way but know a lot of colleagues who are slightly more sceptic.

Thank you very much for your feedback. We really appreciate you trying the lessons out and commenting on them as this is the best way for us to iron out any problem encountered and making sure the experience is as smooth as it can be.

We are working on preventing data loss or submitting a task in error before it is completed and our academic team will let you know when the assessment of the task takes place.

Thank you for asking. Our academic team is working on them as we speak. Everything will be done from our end automatically and we will let you know once the reports are ready, so there is nothing you need to worry about from your end.

We did the writing assignment "How we met" on January 29 in my English 5 class with ESHU15 and encountered the same problem that Hildé experienced with her class. Luckily she had informed me of the problem so I had my students write in another Word processor so it didn’t affect the student, except for two who ignored the instructions and wrote directly in EF-class’ writing box. So only two students lost their work. But I just wanted to alert you that it happened in my class as well. During the lesson I noticed that some of the students were sort of fading in and out from the list of students who had joined the lesson.

This is to let you know that we've not forgotten about this writing task, and we're in the process of marking them now! I will be releasing the first batch back to teachers today, and over the next two weeks, the rest of you will get your students' work back.

I know some of you have been waiting a while, so thank you for your patience! I'll try get the earlier ones out first, and then work back in a queue system.

I'm marking the scripts and sending them back one class at a time, as hopefully this will ensure that nobody waits longer than they need to for their results.